On June 28, during her high visibility visit to Jamaica, IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde granted an exclusive interview to Dionne Jackson Miller for Television Jamaica’s current affairs show, “All Angles.”
The first portion of the interview focused significantly on the devaluation of the Jamaican currency, which is one of the measures being pursued as part of the programme under the current four-year Extended Fund Facility, which Jamaica negotiated with the IMF.
Lagarde was firm in her position that the Jamaican dollar had been “wrongly valued… significantly over-valued relative to the state of the economy.” That state of affairs, she said, had been “accentuated by the fact that there was high inflation.”
She made it clear, however, that the current emphasis on “right valuation” of the Jamaican dollar was not a dogmatic position, in perpetuity, but one that was predicated on the expectation that, with the success of the mix of policy measures being pursued, “then it migh very well mean appreciation of the Jamaican currency.”
Nor did she give any credence to the Opposition’s call for fixing the exchange rate, for a while. “You cannot continue having an economy where the currency is largely over-valued, because if you do that, you have to continuously sell reserves, and the reserves of the country are critically important for it to operate.”
CLICK ON THE ARROW ABOVE TO ACCESS AUDIO OF PART ONE OF THE INTERVIEW
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IMF Chief stands firm on devaluation - "All Angles" interview
